Economic Revitalization
Tracking downtown revitalization
Since the onset of COVID-19, DSA has been tracking the impact on our local economy. As downtown bounces back, we continue to follow dozens of metrics to trace the path to full economic recovery. A few of these metrics are below.
Downtown Revitalization Dashboard
January 2024 (December data)
Downtown Seattle was the first American urban center to experience the impacts of COVID-19, enduring a sudden economic downturn. As downtown continues to evolve, DSA will publish a monthly Revitalization Dashboard examining key metrics. The data sets provide a comparison point to the same time period in 2019. Additionally, the dashboard will feature notable stories that provide context regarding downtown’s renewal and reemergence.
Please credit the Downtown Seattle Association Revitalization Dashboard for use of charts, data and images on this page.
Total monthly visitors since 2019
More than 2.4 million unique visitors came downtown during December 2024. This represents 88% of the visitors seen in December 2019, and was a 6% increase over the number of visitors seen during December 2023.
Average weekday worker foot traffic compared to 2019
In December, downtown’s average weekday worker foot traffic was 58% of December 2019’s average. Including the holidays, downtown averaged more than 75,000 workers per weekday. This represents a 5% increase from December 2023, possibly due to major holidays falling in the middle of the week.
Monthly hotel rooms sold compared to 2019
There were more than 255,000 downtown hotel rooms sold in December 2024. This figure represents 84% of the demand in December 2019, and is a 9% increase compared to December 2023.
At the end of Q4 2024, the number of occupied apartment units downtown continued growing, rising to nearly 59,000 units. This represented a 4% increase compared to Q4 2023 and a 17% increase compared to Q4 2019.
Of Note in Downtown
DSA/MID produced more than 3,500 hours of free activities in 2024 in four downtown parks: Bell Street Park, Occidental Square, Pioneer Park and Westlake Park.
In 2024, there were 88 openings of new street-level businesses within the 300 square blocks of the Metropolitan Improvement District.
Coming Up in Downtown
Town Hall Seattle will host A Conversation with Percival Everett at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 23. This event with the author of #1 New York Times bestseller and National Book Award-winning novel “James” will be in-person and available online.
Youth volleyball takes over the Seattle Convention Center for the MLK Seattle Kickoff Jan. 18–20. The tournament will utilize both convention buildings with an expected attendance of nearly 6,000 people and an economic impact of millions of dollars.
Usher in the Year of the Snake on Sunday, Jan. 26. DSA/MID festivities begin in Westlake Park at 11:30 a.m., with a performance featuring the talented Mak Fai Kung Fu Dragon & Lion Dance Association at noon. The performers will then move to First and Pike for a 1 p.m. show.
COVID-19 Downtown Recovery Weekly Snapshot
These charts show weekly statistics from March 2020 through the most recent week available. To indicate the level of recovery, data is displayed as a percent of the same metric for the comparable week of 2019.
Notes on Sources
Downtown foot traffic data are provided by Placer.ai and are based on cell phone location data. Each person is counted once per day. International visitors are not included. Subsets of this data in the charts are as follows:
- Office worker presence is estimated based on visits by workers who were present between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays in the downtown neighborhoods with the heaviest concentration of office space.*
- Total visitors includes those who do not live or work downtown. It does not include international visitors.
- Hotel data are based on monthly reports from STR, provided by Visit Seattle.
- Apartment occupancy data are from CoStar. This is reported quarterly but the current quarter data are updated in real-time as new information is added to the database.
- Domestic visitors counts those who do not live or work downtown.
- Total foot traffic includes all visits to downtown by domestic visitors, residents and workers.
- Pike Place Market visitors includes domestic visitors who do not live or work at the Pike Place Market.
*Note that workers who have not visited their work site in the past 90 days are classified as “visitors” until they are regularly visiting their work site at least three times in a one-week period.